Low-Income West Virginians Face Food Assistance Cut in November

350,000 low-income people in West Virginia will see their food assistance cut when a temporary boost to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) expires November 1, new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) show.[1] SNAP benefits will average only about $1.40 per person per meal after the cut.

The cut will affect all of the nearly 47 million Americans, including 22 million children, who receive SNAP benefits. For a family of three, that cut will likely amount to $29 a month. That’s a serious loss given SNAP’s already low benefit levels and the very low incomes of SNAP participants — over 80 percent of SNAP households live in poverty.

In West Virginia, the benefit cut through October 2014 will total $36 million, slowing economic growth by reducing overall consumption. Nationally, the cut will total roughly $5 billion in federal fiscal year 2014 and an additional $6 billion across fiscal years 2015 and 2016.

Benefit Increase Designed to Boost Economy and Ease Hardship

Congress enacted the benefit increase as part of the 2009 Recovery Act to deliver high “bang-for-the-buck” economic stimulus and ease hardship. The Recovery Act boosted SNAP’s maximum monthly benefits by 13.6 percent beginning in April 2009. It provided that SNAP benefit levels would continue at the new, higher amount until SNAP’s regular annual inflation adjustments to the maximum benefit exceeded the Recovery Act amount. But Congress has since voted to accelerate the sunset of the benefit increase to October 31.

The scheduled cuts are especially painful in light of the inadequacy of existing benefit levels. In a report issued by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, nutrition experts identified several shortcomings with the current SNAP benefit allotment and recommended evaluating ways of changing the benefit calculation to better ensure that households have enough resources to purchase an adequate diet. [2]

Benefit Cuts Will Increase Hardship

These cuts will likely cause hardship for many SNAP participants, who will include 22 million children in 2014 (10 million of whom live in “deep poverty,” with family incomes below half the poverty line) and nine million people who are elderly or have a serious disability. In West Virginia, 350,000 participate in the program — that’s nearly 1 in 5 residents.

USDA has found that the Recovery Act’s benefit boost reduced the number of households in which one or more persons had to skip meals or otherwise eat less because they lacked money — what USDA calls “very low food security” — by about 500,000 households in 2009.[3] More recent research finds that boosting SNAP benefits during the summer for households with school-aged children who don’t have access to USDA’s summer food program cut very low food security among these households by nearly 20 percent.[4]

Given this research and the inadequacy of current benefit levels, we can reasonably assume that a reduction in SNAP benefit levels of this size will significantly increase the number of poor households that have difficulty affording adequate food this fall.

Evidence Doesn’t Support Argument for Cutting SNAP

The Obama Administration and some members of Congress have proposed delaying or cancelling the November 1 cut, but Congress has taken no action on these proposals. Moreover, some in Congress have called for deep cuts in SNAP on top of the scheduled cut. The House of Representatives, which recently defeated legislation that would have cut $20 billion from SNAP — eliminating food assistance for nearly 2 million people — could reconsider these or even deeper cuts in the coming weeks.

Supporters of large SNAP cuts claim that because SNAP enrollment hasn’t declined in tandem with the unemployment rate over the past few years, the program’s enrollment growth in recent years is largely unrelated to the poor economy. In reality, however, the recent reductions in the unemployment rate overstate the improvements in the labor market, as Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has observed.[5] The proportion of the adult population with a job — the employment rate — has barely improved since the recession bottomed out.

In addition, the number of unemployed workers not receiving unemployment benefits — the group of the unemployed most likely to qualify for SNAP because they have neither wages nor UI benefits — has continued to grow and is higher now than at the bottom of the recession. Also, the historical record shows that declines in poverty and SNAP enrollment typically lag behind declines in the unemployment rate following recessions.

[1] For more detail on the scheduled cut, see Stacy Dean and Dorothy Rosenbaum, “SNAP Benefits Will Be Cut for All Participants in November 2013,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 1, 2013, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3899.

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